Abarat: Absolute Midnight a-3

by Clive Barker

  There were shrieks from several of the minister’s flock (the shrillest from Mr. Elliot) as they apparently decided that they’d witnessed quite enough for one day. They started to walk, then race toward the front door. They weren’t fast enough. Bill turned his back on the altar and threw the force of his attention at the exits. Candy did not know if he made another gesture or if it was simply his will that caused the huge doors to slam shut and the bolts to slide noisily home to seal the contract.

  Norma Lipnik had been closest to the doors when they closed. Now, shaken by the noise, she retreated from the entrance, calling to her minister as she did so.

  “Please, Reverend!” she said, putting on the warm, unflustered voice she always used when things went awry at the hotel, “I really have to go.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, woman!”

  “But you don’t understand . . .”

  That’s it, Candy thought, keep talking, Norma. Every second that Norma Lipnik wasted distracting Bill Quackenbush was another second Candy could devote to figuring out how to undo the theft of her treasured knowledge.

  She stumbled, her legs weak and aching, around the altar to the device itself. The phials that contained her memories seemed to already know that she intended to reclaim them, as though some tenuous thread of thought between her mind and these stolen experiences still existed. The substance in the phials—was it liquid or gaseous? Perhaps both—sensed her proximity and it raced around the glass. It had been colorless, but it had darkened in its agitated state, until it was the purple-gray of a thunderhead, in the belly of which multicolored lightning rods bloomed.

  She was still staring at it in dazed wonder when she heard the voice of her father from across the church: “If you touch my machine, I’ll kill you where you stand!”

  Chapter 32

  Sacrilege

  CANDY LOOKED BACK AT her father, just in time to see him conjure a trinity of thin, silver-tipped arrows. With their silver tips glinting, they flew at her and she felt a nauseating tug in her belly, as though they were homing in on her innards.

  She let them get to the other side of the altar before she made her move, forcing her less-than-eager legs to shift her out of their path at the very last moment. The needles were too close to change direction, and struck at the spot where she had been standing seconds before. The first needle hit the middle of the device, causing an arc of yellow-green lightning to leap from it, while the other two struck the phials causing a few of them to explode instantly. Their contents emptied like flowering clouds, the colors they contained suddenly blazing like glorious fires. They returned instantly to their owner, performing a celebration dance of liberation by circling Candy three or four times, then without warning, leaping back into her.

  Oh, the bliss of that! The unadulterated joy of being reunited with herself. Her head was like a pail into which a dam was pouring its contents, images that she had forgotten she’d owned blazing for a tiny perfect instant in her mind’s eye before another came to show its beauty to her. A bird, a tower, a slave, a face, ten faces, a thousand faces, a moon in a tree, a glass of water, a wave, a tear, a laughing moth, her mom, Ricky, Don, Diamanda, Carrion, the Dead Man’s House, the Yebba Dim Day, a bottle of rum, Kaspar, Malingo—oh, Malingo, Malingo, Malingo—

  k

  She was laughing now, in her sleep, and saying his name.

  “Malingo! Malingo! Malingo!”

  “I think the worst might be over,” Geneva said cautiously.

  “Let’s hope so,” said John Mischief. “Because my heart can’t take much more of this.”

  “Your heart?” said John Drowze. “What about mine?”

  His complaint started them all going.

  “—and mine!”

  “—and me!”

  “Shut your nattering traps!” said Two-Toed Tom. “It isn’t over till it’s over.”

  Candy threw her will against the other phials. There was no anger in it. The pleasure of the reunion had washed her clean, and her cleanliness gave the blows greater force. All but one of the phials blew, and Candy’s memories and meditations, prayers, dreams, and revelations, came back to her in all their chaotic, glorious, profusion.

  “You stupid cow!” her father yelled.

  He surged at the mass of obstacles between them—both chairs and people—sweeping them aside. Then he came at her. She could see on his face what he intended. He wasn’t going to trust magic to punish her. It was apparent that he intended to deal with her the old-fashioned way—with his hands. He was coming at her quickly too. Moving much faster than expected, given his beer gut and his lumbering gait. His face was beet red with fury, his gritted teeth yellowish, the color and light in his eyes completely extinguished, leaving two black slits, without so much as a highlight to relieve their eerie veracity.

  Keeping her gaze fixed on him she fumbled for the final phial, and pulling it out of its holder she lifted it above her head and with all the strength her beleaguered limbs could muster, she threw it to the ground at her feet. There was a satisfying noise of breaking glass erased almost immediately by a soft whump as the contents burst into a ball of smoke and flowers, doubling its size with every passing second, spitting out riotous smears of color that graciously curved upward until they were a few feet from their source, and climbed at a giddy speed to explode a second time when they struck the ceiling. There was a loud, sharp crack, followed by several splintering sounds, as one of the support beams cracked. Globs of white plaster dropped to the floor where they shattered.

  “How dare you!” Bill said, his tone so ludicrously theatrical she almost laughed. “This is sacred ground.”

  Candy let the thoughts from the final phial, having burst against the ceiling, come down into her. She was almost complete. She had her memories back, but she was running out of tricks. Under her breath, she muttered, “Diamanda, if you can hear me . . . please help . . .”

  On the shores of the Twenty-Fifth Hour, walking with her sometime husband, the love of her life (and afterlife)—the once-pitiful ghost in Room Nineteen, Henry Murkitt—Diamanda heard her name called. She recognized the voice instantly.

  “Candy’s calling me,” she said. “We have to go. She’s in danger.”

  Bill lunged and caught hold of Candy. His hands were huge and heavy, as though he had lead for bones. He struck her across the face.

  Almost as a reflex, Candy channeled her shock and turned her thoughts from her father’s twisted face to something even less pleasant: the Fever Gibe, one of the Beasts of Efreet, leaning up on its back legs, the purple-blue spines on its hide standing on end. She cast the image out into the air behind her father, continuing to add details to it as she did so. Its forelimbs with their razor claws. And worse, its head, which opened like a grotesque flower with but one petal, red and moist, which spread and stretched, uncaging the vast tooth-lined maw at its center. Though it was made of dust, light and memory, touched into life by the powers she’d reclaimed, it had sufficient self-intent to immediately turn its fury on the panicking fools stumbling among the overturned chairs. It loosed a roar, and the church’s stained-glass windows blew out.

  “Reverend!” Futterman said. He had crawled away from the place where he’d fallen, and was at the minister’s feet. “Forget her! Please! You’re a man of God. Summon up an angel. Make this thing go away.”

  “There’s nothing there,” Bill Quackenbush said, still holding Candy. His fingers had gone to her neck, his thumbs pressed against her windpipe, cutting off the flow of air. “It’s just something my idiot daughter gave birth to.”

  “Well, tell her to make it go away.”

  “You heard the man, Candy. Make it go away,” Bill said, and he squeezed tighter.

  “. . . can’t . . .” Candy said.

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  Despite her desperate situation, Candy managed a tiny smile.

  “Say good-bye,” her father said to her. The tone of his voice was matter-of-fact. He was simply
stating the truth. “You’re not my daughter. I don’t know whose you are, but you’re not mine.”

  He pressed his thumbs down even harder on Candy’s neck. She fought for breath, but none was coming. All she could think to do was to summon the Efreetian Beast she’d conjured back to her. It came. She saw it rise up behind her father’s head, the veins in the stretched flesh around its mouth throbbing. He saw its reflection in her eyes, it seemed, because he turned and, an instant before she lost consciousness for want of breath, his grip on her throat loosened. She gingerly extracted herself from his hands and slid down the wall, gratefully drinking the air.

  The Fever Gibe was leaning over her father. A string of saliva ran from its gaping mouth and landed on his face. It must have stung because he cursed, then retaliated against the Gibe with his own silver-tipped darts. When they struck the beast, it curled and eddied like smoke, only to recover its form once the dart had passed through it.

  “How dare you bring your filth into this holy place!” he yelled.

  He turned to face the mirage, firing his bolts into it over and over. The coherence of the image could not hold in the face of such a consistent assault. The holes in the creature grew larger, its matter growing thin and finally dissolving completely. There was a long moment while everyone recovered from the events. Candy didn’t wait for her father to renew his attack. She moved around the side of the altar and then began to race toward the door.

  “No way out!” her father yelled behind her.

  She’d seen him close the door and bolt it to keep Norma Lipnik from leaving, but that couldn’t keep her from unbolting it, and getting back out onto the street.

  “Catch her, you fools!” her father shouted. “Don’t let her get out of here!”

  They had seen what their Reverend was capable of and out of blind fear they did as he instructed. Candy kept her eyes fixed on the door, but from the corner of her eyes she could sense her father’s people closing in on her from both left and right. She wasn’t going to make it to the door before they laid their hands on her, she knew. She forced her weakened legs to work till they throbbed, but there simply wasn’t enough speed in them.

  “Bring her down!” Bill yelled. “The first one with their hand on her gets to drink from the cup of her power. After me, of course.”

  Her own father giving a piece of her away, as though she was his to give? It was too much! She stopped running, and turned on her heel.

  “You’re right!” she yelled across the church at him. “I’m not your daughter! You don’t know me! You never did and you never will! I belong—

  k

  “—to the Abarat,” Candy said in her sleep.

  “That’s my girl,” Malingo said softly.

  “It’s a fine sentiment,” John Mischief murmured. “I just hope it isn’t the last thing she says!”

  Candy didn’t try to retrace her steps to the altar. She knew she had no hope of getting there. The minister’s mob was just a few steps from seizing hold of her. She raised her arms, openhanded.

  “If you’re going to take me,” she said, looking at them with naked contempt, “then take me. But be careful. I bite.”

  “Take no notice of her!” Bill said. “She has no real power!”

  Five of his flock did as their shepherd instructed, and reached out to grab hold of her. As they did so the front doors rattled violently, and the screws securing the iron bolts flew off. Seconds later so did the bolts.

  The five brave souls who’d seized hold of Candy changed their minds, and let go of her. Only one, the father of Deborah Hackbarth (Candy’s one-time friend and, later, school-ground nemesis), stepped in to do what the others had declined to do. At school, his daughter had always boasted about her noble origins; hence, she said, her delicate bones and perfect manners. To the extent she had such qualities at all, they did not derive from her father, who was a fat-bellied thing of a man, who took no little pleasure in squeezing Candy’s arm to achieve the maximum discomfort.

  Candy felt a rush of wind against her face and a welcome voice said: “Let go of the girl this instant.”

  Candy looked toward the front door, whence the voice had come. It was still closed. But Diamanda and Henry Murkitt had passed through it, and were standing inside the church.

  “I said, let go of her,” Diamanda said. “Don’t make me force you.”

  “I’d like to see you try,” Deborah’s father laughed.

  “As you wish.”

  She started to whisper something, the words she was speaking forming an agitated cloud in front of her face, which with a tiny flick of her forefinger she dispatched toward Hackbarth. The words were upon him in an instant, circling his head. He tried to swat them away with his free hand, but that didn’t work, and they quickly began to sting him, resulting in a burst of obscene language from Hackbarth. He let go of Candy in order to employ both his hands to ward off the attack.

  “You can wake up now!” Diamanda insisted.

  “What about my mom? I can’t leave—”

  “I’ll take care of her. Get back to the Abarat! Now! They need you there.”

  Candy began the process of waking herself. She heard Diamanda speak again.

  “Defend them, child! You’re the only one who has a hope of stopping it.”

  “Stopping what?” she muttered.

  “The war, child! The war between Night and—”

  Candy opened her eyes, as the last syllable Diamanda uttered “—Day!” fell away into the no-man’s-land between sleeping and waking. She looked up and saw her friends, Malingo, the Johns, Geneva, and Tom.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I’m back.”

  Chapter 33

  No Stranger Now

  EVERYONE HAD QUESTIONS, OF course. Where had Candy been in her dream travels? And who (or what) had she encountered on her journey that had caused her to struggle so desperately while she slept?

  “It’s complicated,” Candy told them all. “And I’m hungry. Could we go find some food and I’ll tell you while we eat?”

  There was no disagreement on that. Everybody was hungry.

  “Let me and the boys lead the way,” Mischief said. “We’ll find somewhere to eat. Eight pairs of eyes are better than one.”

  So saying, he and his brothers headed down the gangplank and onto the dock, leaving the others to follow at a more leisurely pace. As she walked Candy was struck by the peculiar hush that lay upon the harbor. Though it was far from deserted—there were people working on board the fishing boats that were moored along the quay, and the streets that led up into the town were busy—everyone was talking very quietly. There was no shouting or cursing from the fishermen, nor laughter and chatter among the women in the market. Even the large Abaratian seagulls, which were usually even more raucous than their brethren in the Hereafter, were not making their usual demands. In fact all but those few too ancient to fly were in the harbor. The rest had gone; the only sign of their numbers was the white droppings all along the seawall where they’d perched.

  Candy surreptitiously snagged Malingo’s arm.

  “There’s something wrong here, isn’t there?”

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” he said quietly. “But what?”

  In search of an answer Candy scanned the streets of the town, which was built on the flank of a steep hill, its whitewashed houses neatly arrayed on its zigzagging streets. Many of their windows were shuttered and their drapes drawn. Clearly, a lot of the residents in the town had no desire to even look outside, much less step.

  “Oh, Lordy Lou,” Malingo murmured.

  “What?”

  She glanced at Malingo. He was staring at the sky. She did the same.

  There was a wind blowing up there, carrying before it, in a northerly direction, a great flotilla of clouds. It wasn’t the clouds, however, that had caught Malingo’s eye. It was the birds that were flying through them. A mass migration was underway, not just of the seabirds that had vacated the harbor, b
ut of hundreds of species—no thousands—many of which challenged the very definition of a bird. There was a flock of what looked to be winged boars, and several flights of feathered dragonflies. Their size was hard to gauge, but if the boars were the size of pigs, the dragonflies were the size of seagulls. The giants of this chaotic flock, however—creatures as big as airships, and kept aloft by the same bloated bodies, but trailed streams of flickering tentacles, like the tails of countless kites intertwined with quarter-mile strings of Christmas tree lights.

  “So many,” Geneva said, amazed. Then, more darkly, “But where are they all going?”

  “Have you seen anything like this before?” Candy asked.

  “No, nothing,” Malingo said. “Even as a kid.”

  “Me neither.”

  There were shaken heads from everyone.

  “There’s plenty of eating places along the harbor front,” Mischief and his brothers had already returned to report.

  “It’s mostly fish,” said John Slop.

  “It’s all fish,” said John Fillet.

  “There’s crab,” said John Moot, “and squidling.”

  “It’s still fish,” countered John Fillet.

  “A crab isn’t a fish,” John Drowze said.

  “Let’s just eat,” said Tom.

  Candy looked at Malingo. The massive migration of birds had passed out of sight. With their disappearance there wasn’t much else to discuss.

  “Agreed,” Candy said.

  They wandered along the small cafés and restaurants along the harbor front, consulting the menus on view outside. But their harassed proprietors quickly appeared to offer them some bad news. Tonight’s dining would be delayed. It had yet to be filleted, battered and fried because it had yet to arrive. Everyone tried to make the delay sound quite inconsequential, a common occurrence. But they didn’t fool Candy.